The development of instrumental music demanded evidently the selection
of distinctly separated tones and of intervals which give harmonious
combinations. The external conditions of resonant chambers may have
reënforced this selective process of historical music. It is certainly
different with oriental nations, which produce music not in resounding
chambers but in the free air and who are singers and not players, using
instruments mostly for producing a mere body of tone as a background
against which the melodies move; their intervals appear to our musical
ear at first bizarre, and yet there too we are readjusted to the
new dispositions for satisfaction with unsuspected quickness. We
have no right to identify æsthetic pleasure in successive tones with
the pleasure in our conventional music with the simple mathematical
relations which alone give the pleasure of fusion; but being accustomed
to this system of harmonies and being trained to expect it also in the
resolved form of the melody, we need indeed an inhibition of habits and
a certain new training till the more modest pleasure in amusical tone
progressions comes to its natural right.
ASSOCIATION, APPERCEPTION ATTENTION
CERTAINTY AND ATTENTION
BY FRANCES H. ROUSMANIERE
The results of the experiments on the feeling of certainty which I
have conducted fall into two divisions--those on the nature of the
feeling itself, and those on the effect of voluntarily attending to
certain aspects of a total experience upon certainty in the judgments
as to the constitution of that experience. The problems of the first
division are: Are there different kinds of certainty? In any one kind
of certainty are there degrees, and if so, are these of a limited or an
unlimited number? Can certainty be analyzed into elements? The problems
of the second division are: Can it be said that in the report of any
experience the judgments made with the highest degree of certainty will
be confined to an attended-to group, and if not, will there be more
there than elsewhere? In such a report will the direction of voluntary
attention toward certain aspects materially alter the distribution
of the judgments of the highest order of certainty over the various
aspects of any given field?
These two divisions are so distinct in problem and result as to make
it seem best to describe them as independent experiments. As some
interesting results on the relation of error to the different grades of
certainty and to the effect of attention developed in connection with
this second division of the experiment, those results are given also.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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